Monday, May 18, 2015

First 10 core chip.

I've been informed a number of times that multi-core chips make video playback (and a lot of other things) much better on a phone. The more cores, the smoother the playback, the faster the loading and better battery life.

This chip ALSO has a very interesting feature that would make streaming video much more efficient (Extremely high speeds.)

So, this is one of those things to watch -- something that will improve the ecosystem for PicoP technology.

Pushing the boundaries are we, MediaTek? The up-and-coming chipmaker just made the long-rumored mobile Helio X20chipsetofficial, in all of its ten-core glory. Yep, you read that right, the speculations were all true, and the X20 boasts ten Cortex cores in a big.LITTLE configuration.

Well, the way MediaTek achieved this is a bit iffy, as we have two powerfulCortex-A72 units, clocked at 2.5 GHz, then four lowly Cortex-A53 pieces, running at 2 GHz maximums, then a quad pack of Cortex-A53s again, which has been clocked the lowest, at mere 1.4 GHz. MediaTek calls this a tri-cluster approach, but, surprisingly, all this innovation is aimed at the upper midrange phones of the future, as suggested by the inclusion of only two powerful Cortex-A72s.

The system-on-a-chip (SoC) kit also includes MediaTek's integrated LTE Cat. 6 modem, which allows for up to 300Mbps download speeds, if your carrier can provide those, of course, and all main wireless radios, too. The graphics prowess has been relegated to the yet-announced ARM Mali-T800 GPU, which should be just a step below the scorching Mali-T880.

The tiny fly in the ointment is that Helio X20 supports "only" DDR3 RAM memory, but MediaTek argues that, since the SoC maxes out at Quad HD display support, DDR3 will be plenty. All that jazz is stuffed into the footprint of the current X10, as the X20 is done with the 20nm production process, and yet it offers 40% stronger performance than the X10, at the same time consuming 40% less power. The deca-core Helio X20 will be sampling to customers in H2 2015, which likely means we will see the first handsets or tablets with it for the holidays at the earliest, and most likely in Q1 of next year. Check out the full X20 specs in the slideshow below.

This is a good article, a little old, but I found it the most comprehensive of those I looked at. This is a very small piece of it. There are great benefits to having multiple cores.From an article about the benefits of multi-core chips: (At engadget)

"Besides offering a better battery, faster loading, multithreading and improved gaming, we saw a lot of new functionality come to our phones over the last year, and multi-core tech is largely to thank. 1080p video playback and capture, glasses-free 3D technology, improved speech recognition and language processing, improved multimedia, higher-resolution displays, and many more features are much easier to accomplish using dual-core capabilities -- and as we start piling on more cores, it'll get even better."